Corpuscularians and undulationalists...

[ollypenrice]

The phrase, 'The war between the corpuscularians and the undulationalists' made me laugh out loud!  What a delicious pair of terms. I've read a reasonable amount about the rivalry between the particle and the wave theories of light without encountering them before and I must thank Theresa Levitt for introducing me to them. Her book,  A Short Bright Flash - Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse, is proving to be an unmitigated delight and I recommend it to you. ( Trivial note: The 's' in Fresnel is silent.)

Aren't lighthouses the last thing an astronomer would want to read about? Inverse telescopes projecting bright beams into the night sky? Horrors! But yes, those of us interested in astronomy should be very interested in Augustin Fresnel, creator of the prismatic lighthouse lenses which bear his name, because he was a pioneer undulationalist working at the same time as Thomas Young, he of the two slits. Fresnel's involvement in the debate came at the time of the fall and rise and fall again of Napoleon, and of infighting between Laplace and Arago in French academia. Lusty stuff! Beats a good private eye thriller.

The book's title appeared in the Further Reading appendix of an astronomy history book I've just had for review, a case of one good book leading to another.

Olly

[tomato]

I once took my imaging kit for a short break on the North Devon Coast. We stayed in the unoccupied Lighthouse keeper’s cottage, but yes you guessed it, the light was very much operational! I went NB and got a reasonable image of the Veil Nebula, right below the sweeping beam…

[ollypenrice]

13 hours ago, tomato said:

I once took my imaging kit for a short break on the North Devon Coast. We stayed in the unoccupied Lighthouse keeper’s cottage, but yes you guessed it, the light was very much operational! I went NB and got a reasonable image of the Veil Nebula, right below the sweeping beam…

And I took my visual kit, years ago, to somewhere in the south of Europe, I'm not sure where, to find that there was a lighthouse outside turning observing a case of, 'Now you see it, now you don't!' 

lly